Uncertainty of resilience in complex networks with nonlinear dynamics

Resilience is a system’s ability to maintain its function when perturbations and errors occur. Whilst we understand low-dimensional networked systems’s behavior well, our understanding of systems consisting of a large number of components is limited. Recent research in predicting the network level resilience pattern has advanced our understanding of the coupling relationship between global network topology and local nonlinear component dynamics. However, when there is uncertainty in the model parameters, our understanding of how this translates to uncertainty in resilience is unclear for a large-scale networked system. Here we develop a polynomial chaos expansion method to estimate the resilience for a wide range of uncertainty distributions. By applying this method to case studies, we not only reveal the general resilience distribution with respect to the topology and dynamics submodels but also identify critical aspects to inform better monitoring to reduce uncertainty.